Filmmaker Ross McElwee turns his lens on himself and his son, Adrian, in this beguiling doc.

Documentary filmmaker Ross McElwee’s best subject has always been himself, whether it was in his hilarious search for a wife (his 1986 masterpiece “Sherman’s March”) or using his family’s possible connection to a Gary Cooper movie to quirkily explore his native North Carolina’s tobacco industry (2003’s “Bright Leaves”).

The beguiling “Photographic Memory” finds McElwee in middle age, standing by helplessly as his 21-year-old college-dropout son Adrian spurns dad’s offers to help launch Adrian’s own career-making films about daredevil stunts the elder McElwee finds unnerving.

The self-effacing McElwee decides he can become more empathic by retracing his own adventures at Adrian’s age. Shooting on video for the first time, McElwee returns to a small French town where he lived for a summer in 1971 in search of his former employer, a photographer, and a long-ago lover. What he finds in “Photographic Memory” is utterly delightful.